I was going to write an article about how Shawn Bradley was not a completely terrible basketball player. I was going to whip out stats. I was going to whip out charts. I was going to go to nerd sport heaven. But Normal Mormon Husband beat me to it. For those of you who don’t know Shawn Bradley (which I’m sure are many), he was a big white dude, and that’s about it. He was as tall as he was pale and skinny (which was very). Bradley is on every NBA bust list that is ever written and he’s the punch line on every sports talk show (yadda, yadda, yadda, Greg Oden, yadda, yadda, yadda, Shawn Bradley… donkey sound effect). So, Normal Mormon laid it out, check out his Defense of Bradley, he might just convince you that Bradley wasn’t a total waste of humanity.
And while I’m not into sports that much being a fairly typical milquetoast nerd, I do love the stats. There’s a very bid difference between jocks and sports nerds. Fantasy sports leagues aren’t made for meat heads, they’re for hardcore mathlettes. Fantasy baseball is like half a step away from rolling 20-sided-dice and slaying the dragon. And I hate to say it, but the only thing I like sports video games is balancing payrolls.
Sports nerds balancing the curve on high school teams everywhere.
This is Shawn Bradley. This picture is not doctored in any way. Not an optical illusion. Not a special effect. This is what he really looks like.
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But I DO think he was pretty good at being tall.